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My husband’s family is from eastern Uttar Pradesh. The river Varuna flows close beside his home; the Varuna is a tributary of the Ganga and together with Assi it creates the name of India’s holiest city beside the mighty Ganga, Varanasi. On my first visit as a new bride to my in-laws home, I remember him proudly introducing me to the river that flows past his ancestral lands with a fragment of this song: Ganga maiya tohre piyari chadhaibo… (O Mother Ganga, I offer this yellow dhoti to you…) A wealth of love, and pride, lay hidden in these simple words. On each subsequent visit, over the years, I have whispered these words to the river upon first catching sight of it as it glimmers beside the road or flows beneath a bridge.

Today, it feels strange, and sad, that FIRs are being lodged against 14 Muslim men for taking a boat out on the river and opening their fast on the Ganga; they are being accused of hurting the sentiments of the majority community. But what of their sentiments? And that of their forefathers? What of those people, such as my husband’s family, who have lived beside the Ganga for generations and have nothing but the greatest affection and regard for this special river that has nurtured civilisation for millennia? In the New India that is Bharat we have already divided up colours (saffron is Hindu, green is Muslim), food (sattvic vs halal), etc; are we also going to decide who has first rights over rivers and mountains?

This might be a good time to revisit the vast amounts of Urdu poetry written on the Ganga by Urdu poets. And the perfect place to start might be the vast ouvre of Iqbal, the poet we are constantly being taught to hate: the much-despised Muhammad Iqbal. Writing his Tarana-e-Hind (The Song of India) in 1904 as a patriotic song for children that went on to become one of the most popular songs for school choruses till its political baggage was discovered and it was promptly discarded, Iqbal begins with ‘Saare jahan se achha Hindostan hamara’ (Our India is the fairest in the entire........

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